Mordecai Richler in a Paris café courtesy of Avrum Richler; others courtesy of the Richler familyTop left: Florence Richler as a child in working-class Pointe-St-Charles. Bottom left: her future husband at a Paris café in the early ’50s. Above: as a model, she worked at Chanel and the House of Dior in Paris“You tell me.”
“No one to talk to when you’re getting a blow job.”
In these dying bars thrived an obstinate clientele of the down-and-out who sat side by side with city mavericks as well as off-duty (and sometimes on- but pretending to be off-duty) cops; characters whom my father not only enjoyed for themselves but for the work he was doing. They were his “originals.”
Some of this company, as it turned out, came in handy for more than his novels. After my father died, on July 3, 2001, I found myself sitting in Ziggy’s with my brother Jacob — it was the day before the funeral — when Ashok brought over a couple of policemen who sat down at our table. They expressed their commiserations, and then they asked if we wanted an escort for the funeral cortège. (Later we learned that they’d liked our father because he had written about the plight of minorities, such as they belonged to, trying to make it on the force.) I was still recovering from the fact of their having offered rather than asked for something when my unflappable brother said he would talk to Mum about it. They gave us a number to call if she agreed, which she did the next day — it had an odd answering service, like a doctor’s office after hours — and, presto, from Paperman’s funeral home to Mount Royal Cemetery, an escort of policemen on motorcycles, bless them, blocked opposing traffic at every light.
This was the Montreal my father chronicled in Barney’s Version — from the detective colleague who became Sean O’Hearne, the novel’s Sûreté du Québec detective, to the Great Antonio who is inalterably himself, a Croatian-born Montreal strongman with a propensity for thirty-egg breakfasts and towing Montreal buses by a chain. At the bar and joshing, his fellow drinkers were fodder for his stories, just as he was for theirs, though it was also the case that my dad liked to have ports of call where he could exercise his friendships once in a while. His publisher at Knopf, Robert Gottlieb, once told me, clearly bemused, that my father was someone who “simply liked dropping by.” On a recent trip to New York of my own, Charles McGrath, for a long time the editor of the New York Times Books section, said the same, recounting how my father would walk the streets of a city that might as well have been his, a cigar in hand as he ambled between his favourite haunts. “He knew so many people,” McGrath said, as if this in itself was astonishing. When I let slip that during my visit I’d been to the same restaurant twice, he shook his head disapprovingly. “Your father,” he said, “would never have done that.”
In Montreal, after the Maritime Bar closed, the haunts were fewer. If he favoured Ziggy’s, it was mostly because the owner would front him a few hundred bucks when he needed it, as if ATMs and cheques did not exist. He prized, as most of us do, the privilege of being a regular. He liked being someone who could buy the papers at the newsagent’s in London and be recognized by its Asian proprietor, or arrive at a restaurant knowing the right table was ready — all this having been prefigured years before when, in the last lines of his novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, the waiter at his father Max’s local, Eddy’s Cigar and Soda, says to Duddy:
“That’s all right, sir. We’ll mark it.”
And suddenly Duddy did smile. He laughed. He grabbed Max, hugged him, and spun him around. “You see,” he said, his voice filled with marvel. “You see.”
By the time his children had regular places of their own, testing such relationships became one of Dad’s ways of having fun at our, the upstarts’, expense, and putting the father-son order in its proper place — and that, note, would be with the patriarch on top, my father never quite ready to give way. In London, when I was working for the BBC, I made the mistake of enthusing about the French restaurant around the corner from Broadcasting House that I was in the habit of taking my mother to for a fine lunch once a month. My father, fair enough, demanded his own turn. At the threshold of the restaurant’s intimate dining room, he started to stride toward a free table.
“Dad,” I said, and then, foolishly, “we have to wait to be seated.”
At the table, he picked up a piece of bread.
“Garçon!” he said, loudly enough for heads at other tables to turn. My father fixed me in his gaze, grinning more than a little and clearly enjoying, more than I was, destroying whatever favour my custom might have earned me. The waiter approached indignantly and asked if anything was wrong.
“This bread is stale,” my father said.
The waiter removed it.
“French fags are the worst,” my father said.
Jack Rabinovitch, a friend of my father’s since their high school days at Baron Byng, likes to recall how he walked into the Ritz bar one night and my father, who’d obviously been there a while, waved him over and told him, quite abruptly, to sit down and have a nightcap — then a second and a third. Bernard Landry, the Parti Québécois bigwig and my father’s nemesis, was sitting in the far corner. “This is my bar,” he told Rabinovitch. “No way I’m leaving before him.”
Today, at Crescent and Bishop, there may be flat screen televisions tuned in to a hockey, baseball, or basketball game, but the same ’80s rock is being played, and a lot of the bartenders and servers are the same people, if twenty years older. It is my father who is missing — and Ashok, and Richard, and Nick. More trains departing the station. Up the street, Jacques Villeneuve’s bar is rocking for a new generation, and de Maisonneuve, once the ugliest street in Montreal’s anglophone downtown, has been revitalized, but still it is possible to drop into these small black holes of anglophone oblivion.
rumpy’s is one such bar, and for the movie it didn’t need much dressing. As I arrived, the crew was shooting several takes of Paul Giamatti, who plays Barney, stepping out of a car. It was his cigar that I’d smelled, the actor evidently in character. Then they started on a couple of scenes with Giamatti inside, the first of them scene 176, in which he is sitting at the bar and drawn into conversation with the blonde next to him. “Barney’s downfall,” said Lantos as the crew navigated the camera along its tracks in the small space inside. A bunch of extras played cards at the back until the stand-ins stepped down and the stars took their places. Outside was the “video village” — a black tent with chairs for Lantos; the director, Richard Lewis; the screenwriter, Michael Konyves; and others to watch the live takes on video monitors.
